Board & Card Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who like playing board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Sometimes, I'm sitting in a bar, hanging out with a friend or three, and we run out of things to talk about. I think "this would be a great time to play a game, but I don't have one on me." My local pub has a collection of games in the corner, but they consist of about half a chess set, half a scrabble set with a beat up board, and two thirds of a nice backgammon set.

What games are good for playing in a bar?

Some criteria that can help determine if a game will be appropriate:

Not too many fiddly little components to get lost; or easily replaceable components if they do

Somewhat resilient to spilled beer

Everything is easy to see, as bars can sometimes be a bit dark

Not too complex; after a couple of beers, remembering a lot of rules can be hard

Easily portable, and fits on a small table, or the space between two people at the bar itself

Also, please let me know if you actually have played this game in a bar, and how it went. Some games might seem good for the venue, but turn out not to be.

(note: despite the beer-and-pretzels tag, I'm not interested in solely beer and pretzels games, though those are welcome; games that are a bit deeper can be fine for bars too)

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

2

I'm not clear on what value the beer-and-pretzels tag adds here. What other questions would have this tag?
–
lilserfOct 21 '10 at 19:38

6

@lilserf "Beer and pretzels" is a very common category of games, for games that are generally considered to be light fillers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_and_pretzels_game The term might be used for games that you would play while drinking beer and eating pretzels, or it may be considered analogous, when compared to a heavier game, as beer and pretzels are to a full meal. It's light, and can fill time, but isn't really substantial. Do a Google search and you'll see that it's a common way of referring to a certain kind of game. google.com/search?q=beer+and+pretzels+game
–
Brian CampbellOct 21 '10 at 19:50

34 Answers
34

I think Perudo (Liar's Dice) would work great in a bar. You need 5 dice and a cup per person, the rules are easy but the game is hard, there's a lot of interaction, and playing dice and drinking traditionally go together very well.

The related game Skull can be played with bar coasters and a pen, and is one of the better games for drunk people.

It might seem surprising, but playing chess in a bar or pub can work really well, with the right people. A particularly fun social variation that I used to play a lot we called "Exchange Chess". It's not a hugely skillful game, but it tends to be quick, loud, cooperative, and leads to lots of good-natured abuse!

You have two or three boards, adjacent to each other, with alternating colours. The players on each side form a team (so there are two teams). The rules are the same as normal chess, with the following additions:

Whenever you take a piece, you pass the captured piece to your adjacent team-mate.

When it's your go, you can choose to either make a normal move, or place one of your stash of received pieces on the board. There are a couple of restrictions; you may not place your opponent directly in check with a placed piece, and you may not place a pawn on the first, seventh or eighth ranks. It's fine to place a piece to block a check on your own king.

If you get a pawn to the end of the board, you can 'queen' it. But if the pawn is captured, it is passed to the other player as a pawn, not a queen (or any other piece).

You are allowed to communicate with your team members ("Hey, it would be great if I had a bishop available right now!"), but you're not allowed to delay your game to wait for an adjacent game (this is called "stalling"). This is a gentleman's agreement; there are no hard and fast rules for stalling. Expect to be yelled at if you delay.

It's considered bad form to think for more than a few seconds for each move. Play should be fast and fluid.

If an individual game ends, chalk up the result to the winning team, and reset the board (the other boards continue to play). If you don't have enough pieces, you must use what you've got. Extra pieces beyond those of a normal game setup are not placed, but are available for placement in subsequent turns.

The winning team is the first to some number of points (5 works quite well). There tends to be a snowball effect where once one team gets the upper hand, things go rapidly downhill for the others. Having a fixed winning point, and then starting the series again with equal pieces helps keep things fun.

One of the cool things about this game is the bizarre situations that can arise. It's perfectly possible to have 4 white-squared bishops, for example. The other big advantage is that poor players have a much better chance against chess aficionados, especially if the teams are balanced, because there's a lot of unpredictability to the game. This gives the game a much wider appeal to beginners than standard chess (where, if you're a beginner, you almost always lose to even a moderately skilled amateur).

Oh, man, I used to spend my freshman year science class in high school playing this with a friend instead of listening to the extremely boring lecturer.
–
Brian CampbellOct 21 '10 at 21:46

4

An interesting variant, for when you're feeling too lazy to draw out a precise grid, is to just stick a bunch of dots in a random pattern on a piece of paper. Play as in dots and boxes, but instead of squares, any time you complete a triangle that does not contain another dot, you take it and take another turn. It works surprisingly well.
–
Brian CampbellOct 22 '10 at 3:06

1

I don't know if I'd say it "doesn't require a lot of brain power" - my buddy and I used to get in some pretty intense battles of dots. It got especially nasty once we both realized (at the same time!) that, near the end, where you are fighting over large groups of boxes, you can give up 2 boxes of your current group to prevent your opponent from getting any boxes in any of the other large groups!
–
BlueRaja - Danny PflughoeftApr 19 '11 at 4:32

Checkers, Mancala or Backgammon come to mind, granted after a few drinks your moves may not be optimal but hey that's the fun, playing with a "handicap". And all of these can be purchased in liquid resistant varieties.

A deck of cards can do wonders. Admittedly not a single game, however that's the strength. You can pick different games given the preferences and number of players. Also, you can also get plastic cards which are water resistant and a single deck is quite cheap and portable.

As for actual game suggestions i like Cribbage. It can require a separate board for scoring, but it could just as easily be written by hand. It's a great game for two and there is a three player variant.

I also happen to be keen on Pinochle, which requires either two decks or buying a special deck. It's a fun trick taking game with a little bidding for three or four players.

Gin Rummy is a game I have played in bars, coffee shops, on trains, and in cafes, etc. It requires nothing more than a deck of cards, a notepad and a pen/pencil. For a darker bar, you can always use vision impaired cards with big pips. Plastic cards are resilient to spilled beer.

As for difficulty, it's not very hard to learn and the rules are not overwhelming. It may be better to learn before imbibing; but once you (and others) learn the game it can be played most anywhere.
Here's a link to the basics: http://www.ehow.com/how_3998_play-gin-rummy.html

Great bar games we play regularly: Icetowers (and other fast simple Icehouse games; the smaller pieces are easy to lose but also cheap to replace), Apples to Apples (the default party game choice), and Nanofictionary.

If you have a little table space, pretty-much-anything-by-Cheapass-Games, but especially Big Idea (one of the few card games that actually improves when you're slightly drunk), Give Me the Brain (and it's sequel Lord of the Fries), and Lightspeed. Button Men is golden; you can wear the game and you only need enough table to roll five dice. Gloom is also a favourite, if you're not too worried about stains on the cards (which would be appropriate, anyway...)

We used to play a game, but I'm not sure about the english name. It was some poker game with three dice and a cup.

The idea was that the dice (for example 4, 6 and 2) create the higest possible number (in this case 642). You called the number and the other player accepted or lifted the cup. If the call was accepted, the other player must exceed the number by rerolling one or more dice. Or pass the cup blind with a higher call. If the cup was lifted, and the call was a lie, the caller paid a point, else the lifter paid a point.

The points where represented by an extra die, starting at 6 and counting down. If you lost on a 1, you had to pay for this round of drinks.

Seems like push your luck games would fit the atmosphere in a bar. The classic push your luck game is Sid Sackson's Can't Stop. I suspect if you had four dice, pencil, pen, and paper you could work out a way to play it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest Phase 10. The cards are fairly easy to play, and you can play it with a couple friends. Decks are also very inexpensive so once they get really dirt, buy another one. Having played it enough at coffee shops to wear out one set of cards, I think it fits the bill

I have played Mao often in pub situations. A couple of decks of waterproof cards can go a long way, and my friends being who they are, they normally have a deck or two on them.

The game is flexible enough that it can be played even with the sort of incomplete decks that you tend to find at a pub. And it can be expanded to many players.

The unfortunate problem with this game is that you tend to need two or three people who know the basic rules already to bootstrap the game. Also, some people tend to find working the rules out frustrating enough to not have a good time.

pass the pigs!! its compact, you just need the two pigs (they are the dice pretty much). throw the pigs on the table, and how they land is how you score. its very simple and can get really fun once you get into it. and with a group its much more fun.

Darts, Pool, Shuffleboard and of course the classic: Get a beautiful woman to go home with you. I think that bringing dice or Banangrams to the bar might be mutually exclusive with the goal of the last game.

Seven Pennies is a simple game of chance with a tiny dash of decision-making, and it enjoyed a brief stint of popularity in the NYC and Boston bar scenes. To play, all you need are seven coins and a flat surface.

No Thanks! is a really fun game that would be great for playing in a bar. It's portable, simple, doesn't need lots of space, and plays very quickly (about 10-15 min per game). It's also surprisingly challenging. It has some tactical and psychological elements, as there's a degree of bluffing and risk calculation. It officially supports 3-5 players, but I've played it with 6 (just reduce the number of starting tokens) and it worked fine.

Tichu is a multi-genre card game; primarily a shedding game that includes elements of Bridge, Asshole (the card game), and Poker played between two teams of two players each. Teams work to accumulate points; the first team to reach a predetermined score (usually 1,000 points) is the winner.